This sort of McCarthyism is unacceptable, particularly when it is in favor of a foreign power! Any official who tries to force these "loyalty to Israel" pledges on Americans should be thrown in prison for treason.

Apart from the mindless US support, I question what is propping up the racist apartheid regime in Israel. No other country supports it and three quarters of its own population opposes it (though only half of the population is allowed vote, so the regime gets the support of slightly over half the voters). Each year they alienate another group of voters. I suppose there is inertia, as with apartheid South Africa, in the aristocratic power structures.

And FWIW, my broader analysis of Syria is that the conclusion became clear as soon as Putin decided to make Assad into his puppet (which was successful). The anti-Assad coalition was not sufficiently large to prevent Russian domination. This is essentiallly equivalent to the CIA backing the Shah of Iran against democratic forces back in the 1950s. The Russian-backed puppet state will probably last 25 years or so before it loses so much support that Russia's backing cannot keep it going.

The thing is, this fossil fuel promotion is idiotic; it simply won't work.

At this point, solar/wind/batteries are straight-up cheaper than fossil fuels, and that's only going to become more true over time.

Trump's vaunted promotion of coal... has led to nothing but more closures of coal mines and coal power plants. He seems to have extended the fracking bubble by a year or so, but the companies are still all losing money and so finance is drying up. Electric cars are taking over the world, quickly.

Trump will end up with imperial control over worthless black stuff which nobody wants -- while China becomes the world's only superpower.

The Bahrain regime is still a Saudi puppet relying on Saudi troops to remain in power, right? The Saudis think they can get away with anything, including violations of international law which cause trouble for other countries, because of their oil money.

Someone very wise once told me that the reason we would not end up with a kleptocratic centralized dictatorship like Russia was...

...we have elected state and local governments. The state governments are now the main force fighting against the degenerate, corrupt, fascistic federal government. They are very powerful, and they have legitimacy, unlike the current President who got fewer votes than his competition.

The Republicans today are the direct ideological descendent of the slavers who started the Civil War. Of course they're obsessed with it. Perhaps they forget that (a) they started it, and (b) they lost.

The slavers were very successful, dominating the US, before they became too arrogant and greedy and started trying to expand slavery into free states and into the territories. After they went way too far, the good guys slaughtered them, as they justly deserved.

At some level, the current right-wing slavers know who they are: they know that they're the bad guys. They want to start a war just like the slavers of 1850 want to start a war.

We don't want a war and we are trying to prevent one. But like Lincoln, those of us who constitute a *large majority* and include all the scientists and all the industrialists, we will not tolerate the domination of the country by a minority of slavers; we will do what it takes to defend freedom, even if it means going all Sherman on the traitors. That is the lesson of the Civil War... but the slavers seem to be unable to learn it.

From that point on, the only option has been for Assad to be replaced with someone else; it's just a matter of time. Hell, someone else in his *own family* would have been sufficient, but for some reason he wasn't willing to do it.

It is refreshing to remember that the world proceeded *very cautiously* with respect to Tojo's Japan and Hitler's Germany and gave them multiple chances to back down and/or change government. The European War didn't start until the invasion of Poland; the Pacific War didn't start until the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

As as result, if we *kick Trump out in favor of someone sane and non-miltaristic* in 2020, we'll probably be OK...

Given how much infrastructure is already in Geneva and that Geneva was the HQ of the League of Nations... Geneva. Move back from NY to Geneva.

The US not funding the UN isn't a good enough reason to kick the US out. If the US shows enough hysterical behavior to actually leave the UN, however, then it should automatically get kicked off the Security Council for being a non-member-state....

Neither the US nor Russia is capable of doing a god-damn thing in Syria. The US should have the sense to get out and accept refugees. Putin won't have the sense to do so and may walk himself into a quagmire as bad as Afghanistan (which Gorbachev says was a major cause of the fall of the USSR) -- advise him to get out and then let him make his own mistakes.

I think Putin hasn't noticed that he's backing a puppet who's already lost power. That is really really ineffective, and even less effective nowadays. He tried it in the Ukraine and failed.

Establishing women's rights is, historically speaking, generally the most important and the first process in any country which is improving itself (or arguably the second after the abolition of slavery). It is, absolutely, a homegrown process, and all outsiders can do is offer words of support, nothing more.

Thomas Ricks explained *why* the US military behaves this way in practice in his Nimitz lecture. The underlying reason is of course that it's run to give money to weapons contractors, not to actually win.

The electoral votes from Florida were stolen outright in 2000 by a criminal and treasonous US Supreme Court. The Congressional Black Caucus protested but they couldn't get one Senator to assist them, unfortunately.

The US military is a completely worthless pile of garbage right now, because it's run by the generals for the purpose of enriching military contractors. Not for the purpose of actually winning wars, which it never does.

After it's destroyed, obviously, the people of the US would scrape together a new military which would win, we're good at that.

You do realize that the "Presidential Election Did Not Happen" article applies 100% to the elections of Reagan in 1980 and 1984, who was a complete phony trying to create an alternate reality. We've been here before.

It would be enforced by attaching US assets abroad and transferring them to Iran. The US government has a dangerous number of assets abroad. What are we gonna do when the title to the land is transferred to Iran? We aren't going to declare war on France or Germany or India or anyone else, because that would be stupid.

The US went out of its way in the 1950s to make enemies with the people of Iran, which is crazy, because Iran was culturally a natural US ally in the region (unlike the psychos running Saudi Arabia). Obama is finally correcting this.

This is nothing new. The US experienced a very similar dysfunctional political situation in the 1850s. The brand-new Free Soil and Republican Parties cut through the crap. Then we had the Civil War.

The US experienced another very similar dysfunctional political situation in the 1890s. Third parties started rising. Teddy Roosevelt partly corrected it, and finally Woodrow Wilson adopted the platforms of several third-parties wholesale.

10 years later, the political situation was as bad as ever, and the Great Crash happened. This time, the US ordered troops to fire on the Bonus Army; FDR was elected and promptly told Congress and the Supreme Court that they were going to accept the New Deal or watch themselves be bypassed.

Our political system has almost completely failed at least five times so far (first was Jefferson destroying the original planned system, second was Andrew Jackson's dictatorship) and it has subsequently been sort of revived, but with massive changes. This will happen again very soon. This one is looking particularly bad, as the existing system seems remarkably unable to adapt; it may be Civil War level, though I'm hoping for New Deal level.

Bernie still has about a 50-50 shot of winning. It all depends on the California vote. Remember what a huge percentage of the vote he got in Washington and Oregon? This is possible in California, though it wasn't possible in the east-coast closed-primary states.

The important thing to realize is that Clintonism is dead. She will probably govern as a right-winger just like Obama did, but she will have no support for it. She's probably so damn stupid she'll run for re-election in 2020, in which case she'll lose to the Republican Fascist candidate. 2024, if the fascists haven't abolished elections by then, the liberal candidate wins by a huge landslide.

Oh, Assad's toast. The one thing everyone in Syria agrees on is that Assad caused all the problems by his incompetent reaction to the initial protests -- they can see the much more intelligent reaction taken by other dictators.

The best thing for the Alawite leadership to do is to quietly maneuver Assad out and put in a different strongman. I still expect them to do it.

No, the Jim Crow South was highly centralized tyranny at the governor's office level.

Honestly, there are *lots* of terrifying examples of high-level government officials inciting violence against innocent people in the US. There are very few *after World War II*, thank you FDR, but the 19th century was pretty ugly.

I sure hope Cruz doesn't win. He's a Seven Mountains Dominionist. He's actually part of a movement which aims to overthrow democracy in the US and replace it with a Christian "Dominion" with Cruz as a "King". In order to bring about the End of the World and the Second Coming.

Really. Google it. He's that crazy and that dangerous.

Trump would be much much better than Cruz. Cruz might actually start WWIII.

The US ought to start planning for the collapse of Saudi Arabia. Since the US government is run by lunatics (I refer not to the elected officials, but to the "deep state" military-industrial complex), it won't.

Cruz is a *theocrat*. His father told him that he was *prophesied* to rule the "political realm" as part of the process of bringing about the Second Coming. He is the candidate most likely to start WWIII.

Rubio, Bush, and Kasich are all deeply corrupt scam artists in the pay of a few aristocrats who have demonstrated that their highest and top priorities are *preventing people from voting* and giving more money to their backers.

Compared to *THAT*, fascism is actually an *improvement*. And that's why Trump is winning the Republican nomination.

The current government is run by *aristocrats*. People are completely fed up with that, which is why aristocratic candidates like Rubio and Kasich and Bush are losing, and why Hillary Clinton will also lose.

The alternative to aristocracy are socialism, and fascism.

When the socialists are suppressed, the fascists win -- as we saw in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s.

Our biggest problem is that the aristocrats prefer fascists to socialists, so they'll do anything to sabotage socialists.

Scalia the most willing to *occasionally* follow his principles? Maybe, but he usually ignored his own principles, so that's not saying much.

You want principled, look at David Souter or Stephen Breyer, both of whom earned my massive, massive respect.
----
For what it's worth, I'm voting Bernie *strictly* on electability grounds. Hillary's a terrible campaigner with no coattails, and Bernie's consistently better in head-to-heads against every Republican than Hillary is.

You did pretty damn well at finding something positive to say about him.

Unfortunately, Bush v. Gore proved that he was an absolute crook who ruled entirely based on who the parties to the case were. And he's done that in lots of other cases too, contradicting his own previous opinions to let the favored side win.

He should never ever have been made a judge. Lawyer, OK, but judge, never. He lacked the temperment.

Israel is completely, utterly screwed. A majority of the people who the government allows to vote have now bought into messianic lunatic propaganda.

The real problem is that these nuts have nuclear weapons. The best thing which could happen to Israel is the total destruction of its nuclear weapons program ASAP.

If the messianic nuts running Israel launch a nuke, Israel and Palestine will, by *self defense action* of Russia and/or China, both be obliterated from the sky and the Holy Land will become an uninhabitable exclusion zone. I think nobody really wants that.

Uri Avnery attempts to look at the South African comparison (sensible since the state of Israel is very very much like apartheid South Africa).

But he misses the main point: South African apartheid fell because of *De Klerk* -- a lifelong National Party member, an Afrikaaner, who finally decided that they were going to lose and that they had better made a deal while they still could.

Basically, the Afrikaaners could dismantle the system of apartheid oppression and elite control on their terms... or try to hang on to it, and be taken to the guillotine and lose all their property. The same calculation faced by the Tsars of Russia (who made the wrong choice), the Kings of France (who made the wrong choice), and the Kings of England (who made the *right* choice).

Israel's government seems absolutely hellbent on making the wrong choice. There might be a "de Klerk" buried somewhere within the Likud Party, but I can't imagine it.

I'm not sure when the populist revolution in Israel/Palestine will overthrow the fascist racist government. 20 years? 40 years? But when it happens, that's how people will describe the event.

While the world recognizes the Palestinian state, the Israeli apartheid government has already made it impossible. They are engaging in additional colonialism, ramping up racism against the Arabs who already have the vote, and now arresting left-wing activists on trumped-up charges and attempting to censor the media -- heading straight for fascism.

The Palestinian liberation movement has shifted to a one-state, civil-society, votes-for-everyone movement, within the last few years.

So how does this work out? The Israeli government will be internationally isolated with the Palestinian state recognized, but the Palestinian state will be a "state in exile" with no actual control.

So what happens next? I don't see what the endgame is here. This is a horrendously unstable situation in Palestine.

The total collapse of Saudi Arabia probably happens in the next 10 years -- does that affect things?

Bernie's kind of politics is the future of the US, which is kind of hilarious given how old he is. I hope he wins because 4 more years of business-as-usual will be terrible for the US and the world. But if he doesn't, his supporters will be back in 4 years with another candidate and will have even more power. The trend is unmistakable.

The only threats are: an outright fascist like Trump; and election theft.

The Whigs were this off the rails immediately preceding the US Civil War. The party actually *disintegrated*, of course, *and* the country ended up in the bloodiest war (from a US point of view) that the US has ever known.

Ah, but the US weapons manufacturers / military contractors (Merchants of Death) WANT all the weapons to blow up. So that they can sell more weapons.

The Merchants of Death have an agenda totally at odds with the people of the US... and at odds with all people of good will in the world. But the Merchants of Death do spend a lot of money lobbying Congress!

Because the guys competing with him fell into two categories:
(1) Socialists, who the aristocracy was terrified of and demonized
(2) Guys like the lunatics at this debate (Rand Paul excepted, since he actually talked some sense).

Trump is blatantly a fascist, and he's actually, objectively, *better* than nearly all of these guys. Think about what that means. This is how fascists win.

For the love of all that is holy, VOTE FOR BERNIE SANDERS. Vote for the socialist, because socialism is the only real alternative to fascism.

OK, so we already knew that Putin supported Assad, basically out of habit (Russia already has a bunch of leases and contracts with Assad). This is probably a bad move long-run, but Putin probably can make Assad into a puppet, and probably feels that he can replace Assad if necessary.

The reveal for me in the article was this:
" It is said that in mid-summer of 2015, Iranian special forces commander Qasem Soleimani flew to Moscow with a blunt message. The Syrian regime was going to fall if things went on the way they were going and Iran did not have the resources to stop it."

*Iran* is unwise to support Assad. Are they doing so out of naive Shia-Sunni thinking, knee-jerk hostility to the Kurds, or what? Support for Assad is not particularly in the national interest of Iran, and they have no capability of making Assad into a puppet.

If we can keep global warming down to the currently "baked in" level, we probably actually can protect most of New York City -- Manhattan is on a very steep piece of bedrock, and so is Brooklyn Heights. I've worked through the sea level rise maps a few times; southern Long Island will have to be abandoned, but that's not a great loss. Newark will have some serious problems.

Likewise Boston and Cambridge will need help, but it's doable.

South Florida is *completely* doomed already. Everything south of Orlando will have to be abandoned, and probably quite soon.

Ah, but you may be wrong. There is a new powerbase in the US, represented by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. And their interests are directly opposed to those of the short-sighted "private island" would-be tyrants.

Here in the US, the primary source of terrorism is right-wing "Christian" groups: they murder doctors and bomb medical clinics, they burn crosses and attack black people for being black, they attack Hispanic people for being Hispanic, they murder groups of women for being women. Several have officially stated their intention to create a "Christian dominion" by overthrowing the US government -- they want to be the Christian version of Daesh / ISIS.

Yet the media coddles these terrorist groups while spreading hysteria about Muslims.

Israeli terrorism is super super common, to the point of being endemic. Everyone who's even visited the West Bank knows this. It's also state supported, like South African terrorism was under apartheid.

Good Jewish people in the rest of the world need to repudiate the terrorist state of Israel. And some of them are. But groups like AIPAC and ADL aren't repudiating the terrorist state, which shows that they aren't good people.

Just as good Christian people need to repudiate the Christian terrorists who murder doctors in the US. And some of them are. But many fundamentalist evangelical churches aren't, which shows that they aren't good people....

This is basically an invasion of Yemen by the Saudi oligarchy. The Saudi government is illegitimate by modern standards, and feels threatened by any hint of a democratic government anywhere nearby.

So far, this is just standard "evil dictator invades neighbor" material. The real question is why the US government has decided to join the war on the side of evil. This is not only evil, it's also monumentally stupid. The US gains absolutely nothing from allying with Saudi Arabia and loses a great deal. Best thing we could do would be to cut all ties with Saudi Arabia, close our embassies, sever diplomatic relations, and institute an embargo against them.

The Timbuktu archives are incredibly valuable, Library of Alexandria levels of value. Only comparable thing I can think of is the Mongolian archives of Buddhist and Chinese texts hidden and rescued from various book-burners over 10 centuries; there is also an effort underway to digitize them.

Putin is a complete idiot, geopolitically speaking. Even Erdogan, who is completely megalomaniac, is outmaneuvering him.

The US needs to get out of the Middle East completely, so that it can act as an honest broker and cool down the tensions between these *morons*. Iran will probably also be trying to cool down tensions -- Iran has strong interests in being allied with both Turkey and Russia.

The US's natural ally in the region, geopolitically speaking, is Iran. But apparently *our* government idiots haven't figured that out yet.

What a *mess*. This is very pre-WWI. The fascist movement in the US, currently following Trump, is the biggest worry, of course.

It's not clear to me whether Turkey will make it to the next election, where Erdogan will be thrown out, or whether Erdogan will attempt to pass an Enabling Act and the country will erupt in civil war before then. Either way Erdogan is doomed; even his own party members are furious at him for damaging the business climate.

Erdogan is no longer supporting his main backers, who were the Turkish business establishment. This sort of heavy-handed autocracy is going to be deeply unpopular with them. Also, he really thinks he can start arresting army generals on trumped-up charges of, uh, telling the truth?

Erdogan's overplayed his hand. The propaganda-campaign election of 2015 isn't a mandate and won't stick. I think the result will probably be a lot messier than the three military coups which Turkey had in the past.

Putin's a moron. We all know the plane was in Turkish airspace; all the evidence supports it. It would have been wise of him to back down on that while saying that it was an honest mistake and that there must be something wrong with their radios that they didn't hear the warnings.

Russia has no essential interest in its bombing of the Turkmens. Why are they even doing it? We know they aren't fighting ISIS; the Russians are carefully leaving ISIS alone.

Those are a lot of different goals. The only ones which are totally incompatible are the Saudi goals; neither can be achieved while satisfying anyone else. Erdogan's goal is also impractical since any military victory seems to depend on the Kurds. A Russian puppet would be practical, but the puppet shouldn't be Assad, who lost all legitimacy when he started carpet-bombing civilians.

If Putin were not an *idiot*, he would be arranging to replace Assad with a smarter and more compliant Russian puppet government led by a Shiite. But Putin is an idiot.

GAAAH! A drop in the lira is what Erdogan wanted, economically speaking. The drop in tourism is bad for business, but the drop in the lira is good for business.

A cheap lira is good for EXPORTING businesses, and that's Erdogan's voting base.

Meanwhile, Putin is going to tick off the Russians. They can't vacation in the Crimea, they can't vacation in Turkey, where are they gonna vacation? He's been making it harder and harder for Russians to take a vacation, while sending Russian conscripts into foreign wars which they have no interest in.

Russia shouldn't have violated Turkish airspace. Putin is a complete idiot, geopolitically. His actions are self-sabotaging and are probably going to *benefit* Erdogan.

Every doctor in the world needs to know how to perform an emergency abortion; it's a lifesaving medical procedure, because pregnancy can kill the pregnant woman. Sadly, thanks to the terrorist anti-abortion groups, many doctors, even at emergency rooms, do not know how to perform this vital medical procedure and are wandering around with medical licenses which they should not have.